As envisioned by Morgan Stanley and designed by Gensler, the solid concrete and travertine skin of the Macy’s Men’s Store building at 120 Stockton Street will be replaced with a glass curtain wall and a series of floor to ceiling windows while the interior of the 250,000-square-foot structure will be reconfigured and re-purposed.

The proposed $59 million makeover calls for reconfiguring the building into six individual retail spaces, with individual storefronts fronting Stockton and O’Farrell and retail on four of the six floors above, as we first reported last year.

In addition, the majority of the building’s top two floors would be converted into 49,999 square feet of general purpose office space and a new 11,000-square-foot restaurant would be added atop the building.

And in terms of timing, Macy’s is expected to consolidated its wares within its flagship store across the street and vacate 120 Stockton within the next couple of years.

Is there a lot of “booked” footage remaining in the under 50K pool? Seems like there have been a fair number of these 49,999 office project proposals in the past few years.

The over 50K pool is tapped out – or about so. Meaning back to “regular order” with new approvals limited to 800K/year. As Kilroy is in the news, this will have a real impact on its Flower Mart proposal. Up to 2 million feet which would take 2 plus years of the M allocation. It’s hard to see planning setting aside several consecutive years of allocation for one project. Kilroy will have to gain approval/build in stages?

Isn’t 5M (not to be confused with 3M of tape products fame) vying for 700K of allocation? A year’s worth. Or have they been granted an allocation already?

macy*s has always operated at a variety of price points – the California operation was fairly upscale, the NYC stores solidly middle class – and this got substantially worse with the May takeover (since so many of their stores were…well…dumps) to the point that it’s difficult for them to develop a clear marketing strategy (one of their many problems); but they own bloomies, so they can control who plays what.

The refacing reminds me a lot of the Vancouver eatons>Nordstrom remodel but I’m curious how the “retail on 4 of the six floors above” is going to work out…getting people off the street has always been difficult.

I remember that the Palo Alto Macys a few years ago was super nice and felt upscale in stark contrast to the one in Fairfield I grew up near. Went back there for the first time a few months ago. Either it’s deteriorated or my tastes have changed.

How about a slender upper tower with some essential housing component ? Foot-traffic helps enliven the downtown when may shops are being replaced with banks and cell phone stores, need to be sure there’s life in those elevations and glass storefronts or they soon become dead-zones

If it’s built anything like the old 666 Folsom, it will take a long time to get that skin off. They spent months with hand held jack hammers getting the old concrete/stone skin off that building. Maybe the Macy’s travertine is more like a curtain wall, and they can just detach it?

So much better. I’m in the Seaport district in Boston, a short walk from downtown Boston and all of the beautiful new buildings have lots of glass and many soon to open restaurants on the ground floor.

Ugh, our new offices relocated there from downtown Boston, and I hate it. So sterile and cookie-cutter compared to the varied architecture (and history) and “creative” street grid of downtown Boston. Walking from the Westin to our offices by the ICA, for instance, is essentially suburban hell … whereas walking from the Langham or Five Zero to our old offices was a treat, passing bagel shops and falafel stands and newspaper vendors, etc.

The concourse level that will eventually connect the Powell Station to the Union Square Station will be under Stockton St. I think there is a great opportunity to enliven that underground passageway by providing access to both the consolidated Macy’s and the Morgan Stanley remodel.

Doubt that the consolidated Macy’s will close. Retail is changing drastically and many urban Macy’s stores are closing. Like Stonestown. Still, for Macy’s and Nordstrom and others, the path forward seems to be in maintaining flagship stores in downtown areas while spinning off the rest. For marketing reasons if nothing else. In NYC the tallest residential tower in the country (north of 1200 feet high) is being built and the bottom 5/6 floors will be anchored by a Nordstrom. That is likely a harbinger of things to come.

As to retail on 4 of the 6 floors above ground level in this project, it’s hard to see how tenants will make a go of it. The large retail center between 5th and 6th on Market is converting a third of it’s floors to office use – or has applied to do so anyway.

If the developer had their druthers I’d guess they would have gone for office use on all the floors above the ground level. The M cap makes them unable to do so, but wanna bet before it’s over they apply to convert a chunk of these floors to office and take another 49,999 bite out of the small project M allotment.

in 1984, Nordstrom had bid for this Men’s Store location (formerly Liberty House), Macy’s won the bid because Nordstrom would have been a “threat” to Macy’s @ Union Square.

I would relocate the SF Downtown Flagship Nordstrom to this Union Square building. A “Nordstrom Union Square Flagship” would be awesome for this location. The current SF Centre Nordstrom building could become a hotel, starting on the 2nd floor of the mall building. It’s location, location, location.

The macy*s East building is quite a bit smaller than the Nordstrom (~200K gsf vs 330). Store sizes, of course, have been shrinking as sales have been moving online, but I don’t think they’ve shrunk THAT much that they’d want to switch – assuming that was even possible – and of course they’d give up being an anchor at San Francisco Centre, with all those stores (and bloomingdales).